by Ha Jin
17
ONE AFTERNOON in late February, a fortyish refugee woman named Sufen came to the president’s office and said she had spotted her fifteen-year-old son in a labor gang in the Model Prison downtown. Surprised, Minnie asked her, “Are you sure he was your son?”
“Absolutely, he called me Ma and hollered he missed home. Principal Vautrin, please help me—help get him out of jail.”
“Relax. Tell us more about that place.”
That stumped Sufen, who turned tongue-tied.
“How many men are in there?” I asked her, having stepped out of the other inner room, which was my office.
“Hundreds, some wearing burlap sacks like rain ponchos. Some are just teenage boys like my son.” As she spoke, Sufen’s large eyes shone with excitement and her sunburned nose quivered. I knew she had filed her petition with Big Liu.
“What else did your son tell you?” Minnie went on.
“Nothing more. Two guards took them away before he could say another word. I’m gonna wait for him there tomorrow morning.”
“Try to find out something about the other men too.”
“Sure I will.”
“Don’t tell others you saw your son there yet. We must figure out what to do before we spread the word.”
“I’ll do whatever you say.”
I admired Minnie’s discretion. If we broke the news at once, we might bring about a chaos among the petitioners that Big Liu and his team would not be able to handle.
Sufen dragged herself out of the office, her shoulders bent and her knees knocking a little as she walked. I remembered speaking with her weeks ago, and knew that she had come with a group of refugees from Danyang and that her husband was a chef in the Nationalist army, though the man was somewhere in the southwest of China now. That made me feel closer to her because my son-in-law was also in the army. Sufen told me that a shell had landed in her backyard and killed her mother-in-law, who had been feeding a milk goat there. The moment Sufen and her son carried the old woman indoors and covered her with a sheet, word came that the Japanese were approaching. So she and the boy took flight with the other villagers. But before reaching the road that led to a nearby town, they were intercepted by a company of soldiers, who detained all the able-bodied men among them, saying that the Imperial Army needed “many, many hands” and would give them good food and pay them handsomely. Sufen begged an officer to spare her son. He was just a kid, not even fifteen yet, skinny like a starved chicken. “Please, please don’t take him away!” she pleaded, holding both hands together before her chest. But the heavyset officer kicked her and threatened to cut off her ear if she made any more noise. She was too frightened to say another word, and all she could do was give the boy the biscuits and water she carried.
Now the information about her son in the Model Prison, a standard penitentiary built by the Nationalist government but used as a military jail by the Japanese, cast a ray of hope on the petition. It also made me see the reason for Minnie’s insistence on the endeavor. If my son were behind bars, I’d have done anything to get him out. I thought that I ought to be more involved in helping those poor mothers and wives.
Minnie and I wondered if the jail also held other men and boys belonging to some petitioners’ families. She called together Big Liu, Holly, and me and floated the idea of sending scores of women to the Model Prison to see if they could find their menfolk as well. Both Big Liu and Holly thought that this might be too rash and might endanger the women.
I believed that we could make the petition a much stronger case if more men and boys were found in that jail. Maybe we could send over just three or four plain-looking women? I suggested. They all seconded my suggestion.
With the help of Lewis Smythe, Minnie got in touch with Dr. Chu, who had his clinic in the center of downtown and was well connected and eager to help the women get their menfolk back. Most of the foreigners thought highly of this man, though I had mixed feelings about him. He had earned his medical degree from the University of Leipzig and spoke fluent German but very little English. Reverend Magee said Dr. Chu was warm and trustworthy—unlike most Chinese, he never minced his words and always cut to the chase. Despite working for the Autonomous City Government, he had a decent reputation among the locals, partly because he held no official title and spent most of his time seeing patients. Magee had recommended him to several Americans as a family physician. On a windy afternoon in early March, Minnie and I arrived at his office downtown, carrying the six hundred signatures and thumbprints of the petitioners.
To our surprise, Dr. Chu had met with Big Liu two days before and was familiar with the case. He was in his late thirties, with urbane manners. His three-piece suit was baggy on him, though his boots were shiny. He spoke while drumming his long fingers on the glass desktop as if tapping out a telegram. “I went to the Model Prison yesterday and chatted with an officer,” he told us in a low-timbred voice. “The man said that fifteen hundred prisoners were held there as forced labor. Many of them are civilians, and more than forty are young boys. But the officer wouldn’t let me speak to any of them. He feared that his Japanese superior might suspect him of leaking information.”
“Do you think there might be a way we can get some of them released?” Minnie asked. I was amazed that he was already involved.
“That’s possible. Try to get more women to participate and send the petition to Shanghai if the Japanese here ignore you. There must be a way to push them.”
“We’ll do that.”
“The prisoners are underfed and malnourished. Some were too ill to work. Maybe you should have some rice and salted vegetables delivered to those recognized by the petitioners.”
“So far only one boy was spotted by his mother,” I told him.
“I’m pretty sure more will be found.”
“We’ll try our best,” Minnie said.
“I’ll do everything I can to help.” He sighed, his eyes dimmed, and his patchy brows drooped.
Dr. Chu was one of the best doctors of Western medicine here, and even some Japanese officers had gone to him for treatment since he had come back to Nanjing a month before. With his help, we hoped that our petition might produce some results.
18
ONE AFTERNOON in mid-March, Minnie and I headed for the garden in the back of campus to look at the double daffodils that were about to unfold. She’d brought the bulbs back from America a decade before and Old Liao had helped to cultivate them. She was fond of flowers, particularly those that bloomed in fall and winter. Passing the small pond, we saw some goldfish, each about a foot long, lying belly-up in the water, and realized they must have been poisoned by soapsuds and night soil. A broken washboard was floating among them. Many women would scrub toilet buckets in the pond. In the beginning we had urged them not to do that, but so many people kept doing it that by now it had become a common practice. The refugees also laundered clothes and diapers in the water. There were three other ponds on campus—one behind the library, another near Ninghai Road and south of the Faculty Residence, and the third before the Practice Hall. But those three were much bigger than this one, and therefore not as polluted.
Although there were 3,328 refugees in the camp now, the 7,000 who were gone had left behind a good amount of garbage and waste. Feces were strewn in the grass and along some hedges, and a group of refugee girls had been collecting them with wicker baskets and small dung forks and piling them behind some buildings. As the weather was getting warmer day by day, the excrement had to be disposed of without further delay or an epidemic might break out. The girls had been digging pits to bury the waste they had collected, but we knew that even this was not a permanent solution. We needed lime, tons of it, to cover the feces and kill the germs, but to date we hadn’t been able to come by any.
“Phew, what a smell,” said Minnie.
“We’d better clean up this place soon,” I said.
“Yes, we must get hold of some lime.”
Without going farth
er west to see the daffodils, Minnie and I veered back toward the business manager’s office. She wanted to send Luhai to the Safety Zone Committee to ask Plumer, who had succeeded Rabe as its chairman, about the lime they had promised to help us procure.
Rulian turned up as we walked along. The second she saw us she said, “A girl killed herself.”
“Where?” Minnie asked.
“In the Central Building.” That was in Rulian’s charge now, because Holly had been hospitalized for tonsillitis and exhaustion. When I went to see Holly two days earlier, she had wanted to come back to Jinling, saying the hospital was too clamorous, but Dr. Wilson insisted that she stay there for another week. He knew she wouldn’t rest in bed once she returned to the camp.
Together Minnie, Rulian, and I headed for the Central Building. The fragrance of fruit blossoms made the air a little sweetish. Some refugees lazed around in the quad, where the two blind girls brought over by Cola, the young Russian, three months ago, and joined by another two blind ones, piped flutes and sawed away at the two-stringed erhus, learning to play snatches of the local Kun opera.
A crowd had gathered on the second floor of the Central Building. We entered a classroom that held more than sixty women. The room had a strong smell that brought to mind a chicken coop, but I was already accustomed to this odor. Rulian took us to the far end, which was shielded by a sky-blue screen. Minnie and I bent down to look at the dead girl closely—she was in her late teens, a tad homely but with soft skin and abundant hair. She looked pallid; her eyes were closed, her lips dark and parted, and through them I could see sticky blood in her mouth. Her round cheeks were grayish, but her expression was relaxed, as though she were about to yawn. Her short-fingered hand was resting on her chest, which seemed to be still heaving. Next to her clothes bundle, which served as a pillow, was an empty ratsbane bottle; she must have found it in one of the defunct kitchens. A frayed blanket covered the girl’s abdomen, but her legs stuck out, one foot wearing a scarlet woolen sock and the other bare. Although she looked familiar, I didn’t recognize her right away.
“Who is she?” Minnie asked.
“Her name is Wanju Yu,” Rulian answered.
At that, I remembered the girl, who’d been among the twelve taken by the Japanese on December 17, but I didn’t know how to tell Minnie about her in the presence of this crowd.
“Why did she do this to herself?” Minnie went on.
“I’ve no idea,” Rulian said.
“Any of you know why she took her life?” Minnie asked the women standing around.
They all shook their heads. A moment later one said the girl had cried a lot at night, and another added that she had often skipped meals, just sitting cross-legged in the corner like a statue and studying the floor. A thirtyish woman, suckling a baby in her arms, guessed that the dead girl must have been a student because she had often read a thick book alone and also crooned movie songs to herself. Since the first day these women had wondered if she had a cog loose.
I tugged at Minnie’s sleeve and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
We left the room, followed by Rulian. In the hallway I told Minnie, “The girl was pregnant and went to the infirmary a couple of days ago. She wanted an abortion. We told her we couldn’t do that for her because we had no doctor here. We should’ve given her more help, but we couldn’t kill a baby. The nurse and I really don’t know how to abort a fetus.”
“Who was the father of the baby?” Minnie asked.
“Some Japanese bastard.”
“I don’t get it. How did it happen?”
“Remember when the Japs grabbed twelve girls one evening last December?”
“Yes. And six of them came back the next morning.”
“Well, the dead girl was one of the six.”
“But they all said they were unharmed.”
“That’s just what they claimed. How could they admit they’d been raped? How could any of them find a husband if they were known as having been violated by the Eastern devils? Neither they nor their families could bear the shame.”
Stunned, Minnie swayed a little. She put her hand on Rulian’s shoulder, sputtering to me, “Why didn’t you breathe a word about this? Those girls should at least have received medical attention.”
“This isn’t something people would talk about. I thought I’d let you know one of these days, but for a long time I had no evidence to back up my guess. Who could’ve imagined the girl would kill herself?” I lowered my eyes and wished I had informed Minnie after Wanju showed up at the infirmary.
“Where are the other five girls?”
“I don’t think they’re still here except for Meiyan, Big Liu’s daughter.”
Without another word Minnie spun around and clumped down the stairs. She went out alone.
Meanwhile, I called in the janitor Hu and Old Liao. They carried the body to a flatbed cart and hauled it away. Minnie turned up, and we followed the men to the hillside beyond a small orchard. We picked a spot on the slope of a ravine and set about digging.
Hu and Liao dug by turns, and I helped them a little, not being strong enough to dig with a shovel for longer than three minutes. When the grave was almost a foot deep, tubby Hu, his sparse hair stuck to his flat forehead, had started gasping “umph” at every thrust with the shovel. Minnie took over the job. She worked with all her strength, leaning the weight of her body on her right foot on top of the scoop and drawing herself up halfway when tossing out the dirt. She swung the shovel with a rhythm, and her supple movement impressed us. I knew she had grown up in a farm village and done all kinds of work in her childhood. She had also been a basketball player at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she got her BA, so she was “sturdy as a Clyde,” in her own words. Soon she began breathing audibly, yet she applied herself harder. From time to time tears welled out of her eyes and mixed with the perspiration on her cheeks. She was huffing and puffing, while her nose seemed blocked.
“If only we could give her a coffin,” Minnie said a few minutes later, handing the shovel to Old Liao.
“I wish we knew where her folks are,” I said, “so they could take her home.”
Crows wheeled around in the limpid sky, letting out grating cries. Two feral dogs, both spattered with mud, stood nearby, pawing at the ground and touching it with their noses, as though they were planning to dig out the interred girl once nobody was around. This reminded us that we must bury the dead at least two feet deep. Old Liao regretted not having brought along a reed mat in which we could roll up the body.
“Wanju, please forgive us,” Minnie said, as the men laid the girl in the grave. They began shoveling the dirt back into it. I took the shovel when they needed a breather.
After burying her, we stood in silence before the pile of earth for a while. Minnie said, as if to promise the dead, “I will never let this kind of crime happen in our camp again. I’ll do everything I can to protect the girls and women. If I have to fight the soldiers, I will fight. I won’t be a coward anymore.”
I said, “Rest in peace now, Wanju, and forget about this unjust world. I’ll come tomorrow and burn a bunch of joss sticks for you.”
Then Minnie crouched down, no longer able to suppress her emotion. She wailed, “It was also my fault, Wanju. I should have stayed in the compound to stop the Japanese from snatching you away. After you came back, we should have given you more help.” Minnie paused, then continued, “Rest assured, those beasts will be brought to justice. God will deal with them on your behalf.”
I felt so sad that I began weeping too.
Old Liao and Hu helped Minnie up, and together we headed back to campus. Hu was pulling the cart with a leather strap around his shoulder.
We washed our faces in the ladies’ room, then went down the hallway to the president’s office. Big Liu was in there, seated on a sofa and absentmindedly leafing through his small textbook. When we stepped in, he lifted his eyes and peered at Minnie wordlessly.
Sh
e sat down and told him about the suicide. He responded calmly, “I heard about it.”
“I’m such an idiot,” she said.
“Don’t blame yourself, Minnie. It was the Japanese who killed her.” His voice was somehow devoid of any emotion.
“I cannot do our Chinese lesson today—my mind is too full.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Don’t go, Anling,” Minnie urged me.
So I stayed, and together we discussed the progress of the petition. Sufen had just reported to Big Liu that she’d seen her son four times now. The boy had told her that the prisoners were sent to tear down houses and build a bridge outside the city, though many of them were too ill to work anymore. They were each given two bowls of boiled sorghum a day, plus a few pieces of salted turnip or rutabaga. Once a week they could have rice. He begged his mother to find a way to get him out soon or he would perish in there. She promised to do that, though she had no idea how. He also asked her to bring him some food, which she couldn’t come by either.
By now more women had participated in the petition: in total 704 had filed. We decided to take the list to Dr. Chu and hoped he would present it to the office in charge of such a matter.
19
MINNIE AND I SET OUT to see Fukuda at the Japanese embassy with the petition. The moment we turned onto Shanghai Road, we saw that numerous ramshackle stores, mostly built of used plywood and corrugated iron, had emerged on both sides of the street. Many of them were just small stalls manned by one person. There were all sorts of things for sale and barter: door planks, windows, lamps, cast-iron stoves, furniture, stone hand mills, utensils, musical instruments, clothing, used books, and magazines. As for food, there were baked wheaten cakes, fried twists, tofu, vegetables, eggs, pork, and pig offal, all five or six times more expensive than before the occupation. I bought a smoked chicken for seven yuan for Liya, who had been weak after her miscarriage, often coughing and sweating profusely even without exerting herself. “This is like eating silver,” an old woman kept saying, watching the vendor wrapping up my purchase in a piece of oil paper. I made no reply and felt that money might get more devalued anyway, so it was better to spend it now.
